La solitude

Although I was worried about many aspects of coming to Paris (Will I be able to make friends in another language? Will I be able to take exams in a foreign language? Will I even be able to buy food to keep myself alive – in a foreign language?), looking French wasn’t one of them. Sure, my fashion sense might need a little altering (my boots, scarves, and slouchy cotton dress collection has mysteriously tripled), but I figured I would fit in at least in a physical sense – after all, I am fairly thin and pale, and that’s all it takes, right? Wrong.

After spending and evening drinking cheap champagne in the apartment of a countess (they still exist), I was feeling pretty good as I got on the metro to go home. I began to let my mind wander, but unfortunately my eyes went along with it, and when we stopped at Châtelet I met the gaze of a man sitting at the station, a huge backpacking rucksack on the seat next to him. Bad move. He suddenly jumped onto the train as the doors were closing, dropped his backpack on the floor, and sat at my feet.

“Tu es rousse,” he said. “You are a redhead.”

Following this brilliant observation, this modern nomad proceeded to tell me about his previous girlfriends, many of whom were redheads and none of whom apparently liked him much. “You are very rare in Paris,” he said. “Every time I see one of you, it’s like … an apparition.”

“So,” he continued, “are you going home alone?”

As much as I disliked this encounter for its awkward, objectifying, and overly sexual nature, I hated it more for its spurring my realization that I just might not fit in the way I thought I did. Throughout the next few weeks, I would hear it on the streets: “Salut, la rousse!” Now that it had come to my attention, it was everywhere, a reminder that I would never be as Parisian as I might feel, a constant reminder of my own difference that was certainly not one of the many I had expected.

On my recent trip to Budapest, I had a similar sense of isolation when I realized, as I stepped off my “WizzAir” flight (Onomatopoeia is internationally recognized! This will be a great name for an airline!), that I didn’t know I single word of Hungarian. Usually, I like to know the words for please, thank you, and whatever you’re supposed to say when you bump someone accidently on the train, but “yes” and “no” are usually pretty intuitive. Not this time. Even the word for “yes” requires multiple syllables.

I treated this discovery with various remedies. When a woman on the street seemed to be commiserating with me about a bus that just cut us off, I smiled, laughed, nodded emphatically, and rolled my eyes in that knowing, “tell me about it” kind of way. When the clerk at the grocery store asked me something about the apple I was buying, I for some reason decided to grab my throat and pretend I was a mute. Somehow, I think she could see through this, but that was the end of the questions. When eating at a restaurant, my friends’ strategy was, when confronted with a garrulous Hungarian waiter, to wait for him to stop telling them what could have been the daily specials and then timidly respond, “…Hi?”

Before these events occurred, I thought that I had been making great strides to combat my fear of isolation. In high school, I was nervous about walking from my locker to class by myself, for fear of being forever marked as a loser. In Paris, I discovered how much I enjoyed doing things on my own. I could go to museums and only look at what I thought was interesting! I could go shopping and not wait for friends to try on things they ultimately would never buy! It was the end of caring about other peoples’ distasteful preferences! I even went to a concert alone, and although waiting for the band to start was rather painful (I can only pretend to be texting someone important for so long), when it started I was leaning casually against the wall, drink in hand, looking like an even bigger fan. “I am alone at your concert,” I wanted to say. “I don’t need other peoples’ validation or interest to like you. That’s just how much I care.”

But in Hungary, all possible forms of isolation came together when I was sitting alone at Café Pattaya, eating paprika chicken but unable to say “paprika chicken” or, for that matter, say hi to the waitress. To pass the time, I contemplated the food I had ordered (What makes tonic water taste so different from regular water?), then decided to write this blog entry (meta alert!) on a piece of notebook paper to look more productive and convince myself that I was doing the “Hemingway at La Closerie des Lilas” thing.

To me, Eating at Restaurants Alone has always been a rest stop on the way to Dying Alone Town. I first decided this in my freshman year of high school when I witnessed a man sitting alone and crying into his endless-refills bowl of pasta at our local all-you-can-eat buffet restaurant, Fresh Choice. The pathos was overwhelming. “I’ll never be like that!” I thought triumphantly, as I returned to my group of friends, who were in the midst of attaching their ponytails under their chins and pretending they had beards.

And I still haven’t been like that; my moments of solitude, so far, have been fairly self-induced. But part of me is excited to return to the U.S., where the language is easy and the redheads are plentiful. After all, too much isolation can get to a person. Paul Gauguin attempted suicide after his fruitless attempts to “fit in” in Tahiti. And that guy at Fresh Choice – well, that’s the stuff of nightmares.